Nielsen Leverages Product Line to Create New Offering

The Nielsen Company has launched a new offering that will enable its advertiser customers to target television audiences by demographic group and lifestyle. The new product combines several Nielsen strengths--its NPOWER television ratings analysis tool, its Claritas target marketing services and its PRIZM NE lifestyle segmentation product.

NPOWER is used by Nielsen television clients to perform customized analysis of television viewing based on Nielsen's People Meter database. With the PRIZM NE product, Claritas classifies 66 segments of the U.S. population based on factors such as socio-economic data--income, age, race, occupation, education and household composition--and lifestyle attributes of interest to advertisers, such as when people vacation, what vehicles they drive and their favorite brands. By using descriptive names for the segments, Nielsen will provide a profile of the groups and information about their media habits for its advertising customers. Some of those segments include: blue blood estates (the nation's second-wealthiest group; business executives, managers and professionals who earn six-figure salaries), young digerati (the nation's tech-savvy singles and couples living in fashionable neighborhoods on the urban fringe) and bohemian mix (a progressive mix of young singles and couples, students and professionals).

Nielsen expects customers to be able to conduct more complete analysis as a result of the combining the functionality of NPOWER and PRIZM NE. This entire initiative represents Nielsen finally pooling its resources across divisional boundaries to launch new product offerings for customers. Separately, customers already find much value in Nielsen's products. Together, they will undoubtedly find a complete solution. Nielsen can probably find other synergies between additional product offerings and perhaps this is just the beginning of the media giant making the most of its assets to build a even more robust portfolio of offerings for the marketplace.